It’s been almost two decades since the first Wallace and Gromit feature film, 2005’s The Curse of the Rabbit Man.
So blow trumpets, sing hosannas and, if you’re up for it, do cartwheels… because here’s the second one at last, and it’s another triumph of pure British silliness, fused with pure British genius.
In an age where you don’t need to do much more than host a reality TV show to be hailed as a national treasure, Nick Park CBE is the genuine article. And in conceiving and directing Vengeance Most Fowl, the creator of cheese-loving, accident-prone inventor Wallace and his loyal beagle Gromit has outdone even himself.
It’s a joy. If you have concerns, I can guarantee that for 79 minutes, this movie will eliminate them.
Always a modest guy, Park will no doubt try to redirect the applause towards screenwriter Mark Burton and all the brilliant stop-motion animators at Aardman, the Bristol studio where ‘feet of clay’ does not suggest a character flaw, but rather a hard month of work. . They have also surpassed themselves.
Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park, the co-directors of Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
The creators of cheese-loving, accident-prone inventor Wallace and his loyal beagle Gromit have outdone even themselves.
Voiced by Ben Whitehead, who replaces the late Peter Sallis but sounds a lot like him, Wallace is his familiar old self, living with Gromit on West Wallaby Street surrounded by a host of silly Heath Robinson-style gadgets just plain to wake him up in the morning. .
He remains a civic hero following the events of the Oscar-winning short film The Wrong Pants (1993), in which he foiled sinister criminal mastermind (and penguin) Feathers McGraw’s plot to steal a priceless diamond.
Feathers is still safe at the zoo – ‘literally doing bird’ – but now he’s using his devilish cunning to get revenge on Wallace and pinch the gem again.
Soon Feathers has the opportunity to, yes, kill two birds with one stone. Wallace has invented a robotic garden gnome called Norbot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith), an ‘intelligent’ gardening gnome who, as a way of coping with increasing invention costs, is rented out to neighbors, becoming a fixture local while walking. in his ‘Gnome Improvements’ van.
But computer hacking is one of Feathers’ many nefarious skills, and he devises a way to reprogram the ever-cheerful Norbot into downright evil.
Needless to add, the cowardly penguin also escapes captivity, again putting a red rubber glove on his head and posing as a chicken.
Now that Norbot is wreaking havoc on the city’s gardens, Wallace’s name is mud. He is even named and shamed on television, on Up North News (hosted by ‘Anton Deck’). Inevitably, when the diamond disappears, he becomes the prime suspect.
Fortunately, dim-witted Chief Inspector Mackintosh (Peter Kay, reprising his role from The Curse of the Rabbit Man) has a smarter partner, PC Mukherjee (Lauren Patel), while Wallace, of course, has the clever Gromit, leaving aside his reading material. (A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woof) to rescue the reputation of her hapless master.
It deftly combines our modern, multi-ethnic, high-computing world with one that seems comfortingly old-fashioned. What a great and welcome gift!
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl will be on BBC1 and BBC iPlayer this Christmas
It all culminates in a canal boat chase across the Yorkshire/Lancashire border, which is one of the most adorably fun action sequences I’ve seen in years, comparable to the epic train chase in The Wrong Pants.
Northerners in particular (and I write as a proud Lancastrian) will enjoy the jokes (‘No Parkin’ made me laugh out loud), while film buffs will also be pleased, with gloriously tongue-in-cheek references to the Bond films, The Italian Job, even The African Queen.
At times, the ingenuity of Park, Burton and that army of animators takes your breath away.
What’s also so clever about Vengeance Most Fowl, as with all Aardman films, but perhaps even more so than most, is that it works wonderfully for a young audience who probably won’t appreciate Wallace’s mistakes (“necessity is mother-in-law of invention’), while appealing to adults in many other ways.
And it cleverly combines our modern, multi-ethnic, high-computing world with one that seems comfortingly old-fashioned. What a great and welcome gift!
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl will be on BBC1 and BBC iPlayer this Christmas.